California Bill Aims to Remove Parents Choice

The California Health Committee senators vote on SB 277 in ONE DAY. This is the bill to abolish philosophical exemptions to vaccines. You can read more about the bill here…

We appreciate ALL efforts: If you haven’t called the Health Committee to express your opposition to SB 277, please do so. This is DIFFERENT from calling the committee members – they’re tallying numbers for/against. Call 916.651.4111. It only takes 10 seconds! Get as many people as you can to call.

Dr. Paul

Below, you will find a copy of a letter that was shared with us on our FaceBook page. Please enjoy, knowing that there are others out there that feel the same as we do about informed vaccinations.

We are California licensed pediatricians practicing in Marin County. We have been trained as conventional pediatricians in some of the best teaching hospitals in the country including Oakland Children’s, Cincinnati Children’s and UCSF, and together we represent over 100 years of combined pediatric experience. For the last seventeen years we have operated Pediatric Alternatives, an integrative pediatric medical office in Mill Valley, CA. During this time, we have treated thousands of children from all over the Bay Area who seek us out for our expertise in health and wellness for children. We are not anti-vaccine, but through our individual and collective experience we have come to the conclusion that VACCINES ARE NOT SAFE FOR ALL CHILDREN.

When we completed our pediatric training, we all believed vaccinating children was one of the best things that we could do for them. However, over time, we began to question vaccine safety. The change came from our own observations of patients having vaccine associated illnesses, in addition to statistics showing that children are experiencing an epidemic of chronic disease, including allergies, learning issues and autism. While we do not believe all of these problems can be attributed to vaccines, we know that vaccines have played a role in the increased incidence of these diseases. We have observed that there is a subset of children who will have significant and potentially severe reactions to vaccines. Many of these children come from families who have a strong history of autoimmune diseases and/or vaccine reactions and therefore we can predict to some extent who is at risk. Recent medical literature has now given a name to some of these vaccine reactions, e.g. Schoenfeld’s syndrome and ASIA syndromes.

Since the beginning of the recent measles outbreak in early January, we have given 220 MMR vaccines. Out of that small cohort, one of our patients, a 2 ½ year old girl, had a very severe reaction 10 days following the vaccine. Her parents witnessed her lose muscle tone and some speech. We treated her aggressively with many interventions that we know help inflammatory reactions. Thankfully she recovered, but many of the children who are now diagnosed as autistic have similar stories, except they did not receive any intervention and never recovered. We have also seen several other children in our practice experience dramatic flares in their pre-existing allergic conditions after vaccines, particularly MMR and Dtap. While these reactions are not life-threatening and so would not qualify for a standard medical exemption, they are severe enough that they might warrant a change in the vaccination schedule for that child’s safety.

The US Supreme Court recognizes vaccines to be “unavoidably unsafe” (http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/09-152.pdf) and to cause injury and death in some recipients. The US government has paid out more than $3 billion to the victims of vaccine injury. Hundreds of thousands of people have reported an adverse reaction to vaccination. Vaccine package inserts warn of the risk of brain damage, life-threatening allergy, and death and no one knows in advance who will be harmed by a vaccine.

Since January 1, 2014, we have a law in place in California which requires parents to get counseling from their physician before deferring vaccines. AB 2109 requires that parents are counseled by a California licensed health professional regarding the required vaccines and the diseases that they protect against before they can get a personal belief exemption. There has been a 20% reduction in the number of parents requesting a personal exemption since this law was enacted. The existing law is working, bringing patients and doctors together to make informed decisions about vaccines. A more restrictive law, such as SB277 is not needed and will undoubtedly open up the state to lawsuits for those parents seeking exemptions.

Vaccine makers and the health care providers who administer vaccines bear no liability for vaccine injuries and deaths. As a result, vaccine makers have no incentive to make vaccines more safe. Until we can answer the many questions about vaccine safety in an open and unbiased atmosphere using scientists without connection to the vaccine manufacturers, we cannot take away the personal right to choose whether and how our children are vaccinated.

With so many seriously sick children in this country, and the ever mounting evidence indicating that vaccines are not safe for everyone, we must carefully examine all of our assumptions about vaccines before mandating them for every child.

The passage of SB277 will lead to more sick and vaccine damaged children. Our oath as pediatricians is to keep children healthy and cause no harm. We urge you to vote to keep our personal belief exemption so that we can do our job.